Although I can’t help making mistakes, it is important to me that I don’t make “the wrong mistakes,” an expression coined by the baseball great Yogi Berra. Making the “wrong mistakes” to me means failing to commit entirely in the moment to an important decision when it counts the most. I think that you can get everything wrong again and again, but if you learn from those experiences there will come a time when you do the right thing at the right time. People who stand out in History are never infallible, but I believe that more often than not they did the right thing when it mattered the most.

For me this piece is about diving into something without caution and trying things I would not normally try, knowing that down the line there were going to be mistakes — something that was abnormally loud, or a sound that seemed out of place. Instead of deleting these apparent mistakes I decided to work with these anomalies, and integrate them into the piece. I did this because the right thing for me to do at this point in my artistic life was to break out of old habits and try something different.

[i-05]

The Wrong Mistakes was realized in 2003 at the composer’s studio and premiered in October 2004 during the Tone Deaf Series at the Modern Fuel gallery in Kingston (Canada).

Premiere

• October 7, 2004, Tone Deaf 3: Concert, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre — Tett Centre, Kingston (Ontario, Canada)